The company's former chief executive officer, Les Hinton, was notified that a Dow Jones business partner was being paid while also buying thousands of copies of the WSJ Europe in Nov. 2010, according to former circulation manager Gert Van Mol who sent Bloomberg News email correspondence as proof.

Van Mol has also implicated Todd Larsen, president of the Dow Jones & Co. unit and Andrew Langhoff, WSJ Europe's former publisher (he resigned last week), who the employee said approved of the payments.

The news comes while News Corp. is in the middle of a phone-hacking scandal, which led to the shuttering of News of the World and has launched investigations into the media company's practices in both the U.K. and the U.S.